According to a flooding of posts over at xbox-scene, it appears that the cooler-running Jasper-based Xbox 360 consoles have begun arriving in stores featuring the highly anticipated 65nm GPU which should significantly reduce RROD failures.
A quick way to note if your new console is indeed a Jasper-based model is to check the power supply. A Jasper will use 12.1A power supplies, while all current models draw 14.2A.
Looking at the serial number can also give you an indication as it is assumed that any model made on October 23rd 2008 or later is a Jasper model.
Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, had decided to withdraw from the huge Japanese cellular market, following five years of attempted gains at market share.
The company will stop developing handsets for NTT DoCoMo and Softbank Mobile, and effectively remove itself from the entire market.
Thomas Jonsson, a company spokesman, said the current global economic downturn led to the withdrawal. Jonsson said lower demand led to the company rethinking its priorities, and noting that Japan was no longer a top priority.
"We've not reached our own internal targets over a sustained period,"added Jonsson.
Nokia did say they would keep an R&D center open in Japan and "continue its procurement activities" in the region.
Random House, the large book publisher, has announced that they will be digitizing an additional 8000 books, in an effort to take advantage of explosive e-book growth.
CEO Markus Dohle added, "more people everyday are enjoying reading in the electronic format and Random House wants to extend our reach to them with more of our books."
The publisher currently has a library of about 7000 and says the new round of digital books will be completed before February. A few of the books included will be novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, and many volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series.
RH vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, noted that e-book sales have increased over 100 percent in 2008, thanks to the Amazon Kindle, but declined to offer a specific number.
Joost has announced the release of an iPhone application which the company hopes will bring more attention to its 46,000 title-strong video library.
Making the application a "game changer" is the fact that users will be able to watch full Hollywood movies or TV shows on their iPhones, in good quality, and for free.
One catch of the service is the fact that you cannot stream the movies over EDGE or 3G and instead it requires Wi-Fi.
Along with the lack of mobility, many review sites have noted "choppy playback" as well as "a lack of content." Its a good first step, but hopefully Joost will fix what it is so far lacking.
Fans patiently waiting the launch of the PC version of the blockbuster smash hit GTA IV may be disappointed today to learn that the game will launch with SecuROM 7 DRM, the brutal DRM that tarnished the release of Bioshock and Spore in the last year.
During an interview with IGN, game publisher Rockstar explained its rationale for adding the DRM saying "we invest a considerable amount of time and effort to release each title, and employ a large number of people in the process. Having copy protection allows us to protect the integrity or our titles and future investments… SecuROM is the most effective form of disc based copy protection and allows us to manage authenticity on a global level for Grand Theft Auto IV."
Making it different than past releases however, is the fact that you can install the game as many times as you want, on any amount of PCs. You will need to activate the game online, however, as well as keep Disc 1 in your drive at all times to play the game. If you happen to upgrade your motherboard or even videocard, the game will need to be reactivated.
The extremely popular Amazon Kindle e-book reader won't be arriving in time for Christmas, says the e-tailer, and those ordering today will receive it in 12 weeks at the earliest.
This marks the second holiday season in a row that there has been a lack of supply of the popular device, but last year Amazon had the excuse that the item was new and production was not yet in full swing.
The Kindle, which is priced at $359 USD and exploded in popularity after Oprah recommended it, "uses an e-paper display to show pages from books and newspapers, which can be purchased and downloaded over its built-in and free data network connection, with the service provided by Sprint."
In other related news, the Kindle 2, which should improve on many of the features the first generation device lacks, has been delayed until spring 2009.
According to media research firm Screen Digest, Blu-ray players will remain expensive in Europe this holiday season despite American consumers being able to purchase them for as low as $129 USD.
"A shortage of cheaper Blu-ray players means that the sub-$300 machines that are already appearing on U.S. shelves are unlikely to materialize in Europe this Christmas," said Richard Cooper, Screen Digest analyst. "Combined with the recession, this means the feormat is unlikely to move much beyond the early adopter market this year."
Citing the global economic downturn, Sony noted last week that Blu-ray player sales would not hit expectations, and likely sell 10 percent less than expected.
Screen Digest does believe however, that the Blu-ray market will be worth 5.4 billion euros by 2012, with players priced under 100 euros.
Nokia has announced that the hotly anticipated 5800 XpressMusic phone will soon be available in Russia, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Finland and other counrties globally. Separating the phone from previous XpressMusic models is a touch screen interface.
The 5800 launches alongside the release of Nokia's "Comes with Music" unlimited music download service and uses a Symbian S60 interface that Nokia has been demoing since last year.
The device is touchscreen and can be considered more of music player than a phone. Its dual stereo surround speakers face outwards and there is a 3.5mm headphone jack, two features not found on many phones. Also included are 81 MB of on-board memory and a large 8GB microSD card as well as a guitar pick stylus. Nokia says the speakers are the most powerful yet on a phone.
Music playback includes protected WMA, MP3, AAC and there is word that the phone can use Windows Media Player 11 as its on-board player.
"When it comes to music phones, people all over the world want a device that is a great music experience and still works really well as a mobile phone, without sacrificing features,"said Jo Harlow, Vice President, Nokia. "The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic delivers on this and allows consumers to quickly and easily access and share the content that is most important to them with the people that are most important to them."
According to a recent survey by Leichtman Research Group (LRG), about one in five HDTV owners believe they are watching HD (high definition) programming simply because they own an HDTV, but instead are really watching SD (standard definition) content.
The data compiled by LRG is based on a telephone survey of 1302 U.S. households and marks the 6th consecutive year the survey has been run.
The findings are not all that surprising given the general consumer confusion surrounding terms such as 720p, 1080p, HDMI and Blu-ray. Cable providers are still only on their baby steps in regards to releasing HD services, and most companies only offer under 100 highly compressed HD channels that never live up to HD's full potential.
Last week we reported that Netflix had failed to get a licensing deal completed in time with Sony Pictures and therefore a number of Sony films were showing up as "not available on Xbox" when users tried to access them through their Xbox 360 Netflix streaming service.
It appears the licensing issues have been solved for the most part however, as most of the films are back and available for streaming.
Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman has declined any other comment about specific licensing deals but did say "We said earlier that titles come and go, that is part of the natural ebb and flow (of these licensing deals). Some titles are back while some are not."
The real issue at hand should be why Netflix had such an admittedly large snafu. The company has been planning to bring their "Watch Instantly" streaming service to Xbox 360 owners for months, and it seems odd that they would leave out a licensing deal with such a large studio.
Atlantic Records, a unit of the much bigger Warner Music Group, has announced that they are the first major label to have over 50 percent of its music sales in the US come from digital downloads.
“We’re like a college basketball team on an 18-2 run,” said Craig Kallman, Atlantic’s chairman and chief executive.
Overall for Warner, digital represented 27 percent of revenue, while Atlantic said digital sales now accounted for 51 percent of their revenue.
With the milestone however comes the clear realization that digital sales will never compensate for the lost revenue of declining CD sales. At its peak, in 1999, music sale revenue was $14.6 billion. Analysts at Forrester Research say that number will fall to $9.2 billion this year, despite the exponential rise in digital sales.
According to Sir Paul McCartney, any plans to have digital Beatles' tracks placed on iTunes have stalled, although he hopes the labels Apple Corps and EMI can "work out the differences."
Apple Corps, whose members include McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and the estate of George Harrison, own the rights to most of the Beatles catalog. In the past year, EMI has released solo catalogs for each of the members on iTunes but has yet to get the rights to release the bands albums.
Music fans have been hoping for a legal digital release of the Beatles' catalog for years now but have been sorely disappointed.
Rumors arose last year after Apple Corps settled its lawsuit against Apple over the use of the name and logo, but so far nothing has come of it but negotiations.
In just a few days after Apple has released its iPhone 2.2 firmware update, the iPhone Dev Team team has already jailbroken it.
QuickPWN 2.2, available for free for both Mac and Windows users, will allow iPod Touch and iPhone users to jailbreak their device to the latest firmware, version 2.2.
With each update, Apple fights against jailbreakers, as a way to protect their exclusive contract with AT&T. An unlocked phone can work with any GSM carrier.
Whenever Apple updates the firmware, previous jailbreaks are broken in terms of the App Store, because most applications require the latest firmware to even run.
According to a D+Pad report citing "insider sources", Sony has plans to cut the price of the PlayStation 3 console this upcoming March, in an effort to be "more competitive."
Sony Europe has so far dismissed the rumor as "rumor and speculation," but Europe president David Reeves is quoted as saying there will be "technical innovations" coming to both the PS3 and the handheld PSP.
The same source claims to have seen game footage of both Uncharted 2 and God of War 3 on the PlayStation 3 as well as gameplay for LittleBigPlanet, on the PSP. The insider added that studio Media Molecule has been working on the handheld port for four months.
Although dismissed as rumor for now, a price reduction in time for the Easter holiday is not all that far-fetched and has happened many times in the past with consoles.
YouTube has begun testing out HD-quality videos on their site, finally giving users the ability to watch 720presolution videos and not the degraded quality of current YouTube uploads.
The new videos are over 80MB large and are assumed to be H.264 encoded mp4 files, the same format as those available from the iTunesHD store.
According to Wired, all that it takes to have standard videos upgraded to the 720p resolution (if they were taped at a high enough quality) is a small "hack."
To do so, take the URL of the video and add &fmt=22 to the end.
Fanedit.org, the most popular "FanEdit" site on the Web, has recently announced that after two years of being online, they have received a DMCA warning from the MPAA and taken down all their download links at the request of their US-based web host.
For those unfamiliar, a FanEdit of a film is "a new take on existing movie material. Anything can be changed, improved, restructured for a different watching experience and only the sky is the limit." Basically, fans edit existing films and add scenes, remove scenes, add music, add CGI, whatever they want, and recompile it as a FanEdit. The site, since the beginning has said you should not download the edits unless you own the original on VHS, DVD or Blu-ray, and even went as far as to place links to Amazon pages so you can purchase the original. Apparently this was not enough.
Boon23, founder of the site, says:"We all knew this day would come, but on the other side we all hoped, it would never. 3 days ago the MPAA has filed a DMCA warning against our download links. The result: 2 days of downtime, in which we removed all download links and all reference to them, making Fanedit.org just a showcase for fanedits without any possibility for the visitor to download.
According to a Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun report, Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, is planning to launch its own mobile phone service in Japan next spring.
The move, if true, will intensify the already tight competition of cell phone carriers in Japan.
Nokia is "expected to use lines owned by Japan's biggest mobile phone carrier, NTT Docomo Inc, under an arrangement called mobile virtual network operator," added the paper.
The service will first be offered with high-end models in order to "establish a strong brand."
Despite being the biggest handset maker in the world, Nokia has only a 1 percent market share in Japan.
The Korean-based company MyRacer has announced the launch of its first portable Flash gaming console, the MF101.
The small handheld has a 2.4-inch, 290K color LCD screen with 320x240 resolution and uses a 192MHz ARM processor. The console has 1GB of internal memory which the company says can hold about 1000 Flash-based games. The media device can also play back text, music, photos and even movies as well as additional support for subway map views.
It is unclear whether the console can play full Flash-based games or only those available with Flash Lite, but even if it is the latter, there are many Flash Lite games as well. The handheld has two directional pads as well as shoulder keys. An SD slot allows for expandable memory.
The MF101 is available in Korea for the equivalent of $66 USD but some retailers are exporting it to North America for the equivalent of $104 USD.
Denon Electronics, makers of high end home theater equipment, have announced they will be giving away free copies of both Batman Begins and The Dark Knight in Blu-ray with the purchase of any one of their three standalone Blu-ray players.
The three players are the $749 USD DVD-1800BD, $999 DVD-2500BTCI or $1,999 DVD-3800BDCI, and the timeframe to purchase them is between Nov. 23 and Jan. 10. After the purchase, simply fill out a claim form and send in the proof of purchase from the player and the company will send the two Blu-ray films back to you.
“The Dark Knight truly epitomizes what this high-resolution format has to offer for home entertainment, both in terms of high-quality content, image and sound,”added Joe Stinziano, senior VP of sales and marketing at Denon. “Most importantly, our Blu-ray promotion with Warner is designed to benefit both our valued retail partners as well as consumers by generating excitement for Blu-ray products. Consumers will be looking for a strong value this holiday, season and an attractive offer tied to the year’s highest grossing film will help drive store traffic and sales.”
The studio will distribute 20 current and catalog titles in the format for 205 yuan ($30 USD) a price that it almost certainly way to high for the low-wage country.
A few of the movies available are "Hancock," "Kung Fu Hustle," the "Spider-Man" trilogy, "Hitch," "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
None of the other major studios have announced plans to release Blu-rays in China but it appears that Disney and Warner Bros. are close.
"We will launch once (local) Blu-ray replication capability is ready -- hopefully in the first or second quarter," a Disney spokesman said.
According to VideoGamer, beginning in January 2009 all new Sony PlayStation 3 game releases will be required to support the popular Trophy system.
Despite being a rumor for a week or so, a Sony official has confirmed the information is correct, noting "Yes from Jan 09 all games must have trophies."
The Trophy system was added in July with the 2.40 firmware update and was seen as the PS3's answer to the popular achievement system on the Xbox 360.
Despite word this week from Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime that there will be ample Wii supply for the holiday season, giant video game retailer Gamestop believes differently.
David Carlson, Gamestop CFO, said he expects the retailer to be out of Wiis before Christmas and also expects to have little to no supply of Wii Fit or the full band versions of Guitar Hero World Tour.
"Wii Fit is in very, very short supply. It sells through as quickly as it hits the stores," added Carlson. "And although the Wii hardware is in very good supply right now we believe it may as well be out of stock by the holiday season."
Despite ramp ups in production, the Wii remains in short supply thanks to high demand that does not reflect the overall economic downturn.
A jury has found Sony guilty of copyright infringement and ordered the electronics giant to pay $18.5 million USD in monetary compensation to Agere Systems.
Sony was found guilty of "wilfully violating copyrighted technology on a number of devices" including the mylo personal communicator, the PlayStation Portable and the Network Walkman audio players. The patent in question relates to a "wireless local area network apparatus."
Although Agere won the case, it is not clear whether the ordered compensation is what the company had hoped for. The original claim stated Agere wanted compensation for lost profits as well as monetary damages equal to 300 percent of the lost profits.
Blizzard Entertainment has announced that the much anticipated World of Warcraft expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, has sold over 2.8 million copies on its launch date, making it the fastest selling PC game in history.
The previous record holder was WoW expansion pack The Burning Crusade, which sold 2.4 million copies on its first day.
"We're grateful for the incredible support that players around the world have continued to show for World of Warcraft,"said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment.
"Wrath of the Lich King contains some of the best content we've created for the game so far, and we look forward to seeing even more players log in to experience it in the days ahead."
Stan Glasgow, president and chief operating officer of Sony Electronics America has said that the company believes sales of standalone Blu-ray (excluding the PS3) players will fall just short of expectations and the company will not meet its worldwide sales goal, due mainly to the global economic downturn.
Glasgow also pointed out the obvious when he said that Blu-ray movies were expensive and when they become more affordable, the standard should see a significant boost in interest.
The BDA and Sony had set a sales target of five million standalone players worldwide by the end of 2008 but Glasgow believes the year will end with only 4.5 million devices sold.
“It’s not that far off of it. Maybe 10% off of what we had thought. It’s truly one of the items that has performed well during this economic mess,”added Glasgow.
When talking about the prices of the discs, he added, “They (movie studios) need to make money, and the packaged media (discs) is a critical way for them to make money so I understand their problems also. But I’d love to see those prices come down, as well as the price of Blu-ray players, to drive adoption.”
eMusic, one of the older online music subscription stores, has finally hit its 250 millionth download, 5 years after the store opened for business.
The company offers DRM-free MP3 downloads compatible with all players and for a steep discount compared to titan iTunes. A monthly plan costs about $12 USD and gives users 30 downloads per month, averaging out to 40 cents per song.
The number may seem low, especially in comparison to Apple which has sold 5 billion tracks since opening their store in 2003, but it is important to note that the store has a heavy focus on independents and only 4.5 million tracks.
Despite a small subscriber base of only 400,000, the company has remained profitable for years now.
Sonic Solutions announced yesterday that they had purchased the assets of streaming movie provider CinemaNow. None of the financial details were disclosed.
The new agreement will combine CinemaNow's online movie business with Sonic's Qflix team, the new technology that allows users to download movies legally through CinemaNow then burn them to DVD using special drives and discs.
The combined division will be known as Sonic's Premium Content Group for now on.
Qflix was first announced in 2007 after Sonic signed a deal with Pioneer but the first drives were not released until recently.
Sonic's shares have plummeted in recent months, from a high of $11 USD in as late as May to $0.74 cents today.
Microsoft has announced that users with subscriptions to the Zune music store will receive ten free songs to keep every month, included in the $15 USD per month fee.
The monthly fee allows user to download unlimited amounts of music as long as they keep paying for the subscription, but because they are rentals, they become unplayable if the user ever stops paying.
The ten free tracks will come DRM-free in MP3 format and can be played back on any computer or device of your choosing.
"I think the 10 free tracks is going to be a huge accelerant to subscriber numbers", said Adam Sohn, Zune's marketing director. "People will enjoy owning that music, and I think they'll be more apt to transact more in the store."
According to Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager at Microsoft, the company will not be able to reach its goal of releasing version 8 of its browser by the end of this year and instead will begin shipping the product in 2009.
The general public beta will hit during the Q1 2009, with the final release following soon behind it.
An initial beta was released in March, and a second beta was released in August. Microsoft had hoped to have a final release by the end of 2008, but there appears to be delays.
Hachamovitch added that "Microsoft is being extra judicious in giving beta testers time to try out the software and incorporating their feedback into the product." Hachamovitch noted that the company "received a lot of feedback about how we transitioned from the IE7 beta releases to the IE7 final release, and as a result we want to be clear about the plan for IE8."
Internet Explorer 8 will add better security features, expanded privacy capabilities and new "Web slices" which will let "users subscribe to content on different parts of Web pages and have it sent directly to their browser."
After being announced earlier this year with no release date, the Xbox 360 exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV downloadable content (DLC) will finally become available on February 17th, 2009, says Rockstar.
The content, entitled "The Lost and the Damned," will follow the story of Johnny Klebitz, a prominent member of the "The Lost" gang in Liberty City.
"Johnny is a very different character than Niko, with a very different background,"said Dan Houser, vice president of creative development for Rockstar Games. "I can't go into too much detail on the story, because we try not to give away too much plot before the game is released. But I can say that the story will show you a different side of Liberty City."
There was no price announced but acclaimed video game analyst Michael Pachter predicts $20 USD.
Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime has admitted that there will not be enough supply of the popular Wii Fit peripheral to satisfy demand this holiday season.
"With Wii hardware, I think we've got a good shot at meeting demand during the holidays," Fils-Aime noted. "With Wii Fit, I know we'll fall short."
Fils-Aime also added that he thinks 3rd party Wii developers are not reaching the full potential of the console and are therefore not finding the success they hope for.
"I will be able to say our licensees 'get it' when their very best content is on our platform," he says. "And with very few exceptions today, that's not the case."
Any price cut on the Wii coming?
"At some point, it will be time to adjust the [price]," he replied, "but we're nowhere near that point now."
Sony has announced today that they have added support for Slacker radio to BRAVIA HDTVs with Internet Video Link.
Users can now use their existing Slacker account to stream customized radio channels through their HDTVs. Sony did note that stations will have to be configured on a PC first.
The electronics giant also said Howcast support was being launched today giving "access to just short of 100 how-to videos through the TV separated into different categories."
Both accounts are free through Internet Video Link, which costs $300 USD and needs to be connected to a broadband connection. Slacker premium accounts start at $30 USD.
Just over a year after Apple began offering DRM-free music from EMI on iTunes, sources are indicating that Apple is in talks with the remaining Big 4 labels in an effort to offer their music in a DRM-free manner as well.
The music industry source says the talks are still preliminary and there are no completed deals but did add that one of the labels was very close to a final agreement. The rumor on that front is that the label closest to completion on a deal is Sony.
If these deals get completed, the iTunes' store would finally offer music that is not locked only to Apple media devices such as the iPod and will be free of FairPlayDRM.
Talks have been on and off for months now, add the sources, but if they are completed iTunes should manage to steal more market share in the now crowded MP3 download store market. Competitors such as Amazon MP3 and Rhapsody have been able to gain market share and differentiate themselves by offering DRM-free MP3s.
With the now available New Xbox Experience update, Xbox 360 owners have access to Netflix's large "Watch Instantly" streaming service. However, some users will be disappointed when they see that there are a few films listed as "not available on Xbox."
The movies not available are from Sony Columbia Pictures, and despite rumors, it is not because Sony happens to have a rival gaming console. It turns out that Netlix did not get a licensing deal completed in time, and the Netflix team admits to the snafu.
Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, added that movie titles "come in and out of licensing all the time." He said he hopes the missing movies will only be temporary.
"Today, titles regularly come in and out of license and there is a natural ebb and flow to what we have on license at any given point in time,"he explained. "In the case of Xbox 360, a few hundred titles are temporarily unavailable to be streamed via the Xbox game console. Those titles are still available to be watched on subscribers' computers and on TVs via other partner devices, and we hope they'll be licensed for Xbox 360 shortly."
A new Juniper research report has stated that despite increased interest in mobile gaming, sales of games have "flatlined across North America and Western Europe".
The total retail value of the mobile gaming market is expected to almost double in the next 5 years from $5.4 billion USD to $10 billion USD however "limited on-portal revenue share for publishers is driving some away from the sector and poor games marketing fails to capture customer attention."
"The revenue share offered by Apple to games publishers is incredibly attractive,"said Dr Windsor Holden, author of the report, speaking about how iPhone gaming has helped bring increased interest to the market.
"The danger is that if operators do not respond with a similar business model, publishers faced with low margins may simply exit Java completely, thereby reducing consumer choice in the longer term."
At the Adobe MAX developer’s conference yesterday, Adobe showed off their latest Flash player, one that works on both Windows Mobile phones as well as the new Android-based phone, the T-Mobile G1.
“We are excited to be working alongside Adobe to bring Flash technology to Android,”said Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google. “Adobe Flash is crucial to a rich Internet and content experience on mobile devices and we are thrilled that Google will be one of the first companies along with the Open Handset Alliance to bring Flash technology to the smartphone market.”
Notably absent from the presentation was the popular Apple smartphone, the iPhone. Although Adobe has said they have a Flash player that will work on the iPhone OS, Apple's strict TOS will not allow it into the App Store. I mean, why would Apple let consumers play free Flash based games or watch movies from sites like Hulu when they can instead be locked into iTunes, the App Store and other Apple run platforms?
Adobe notes that 98 percent of computers have Flash installed, and it is becoming crucial to have it to enjoy the Internet. That is of course, unless you own an iPhone.
According to a new Wall Street Journal article, Hong Kong based movie pirates have begun selling bootlegBlu-ray films on standard DVDs, using the AVCHD format to fit a 720p film onto a cheap DVD-5.
Although the AVCHD discs only offers 720p and not the full HD1080p, most consumers cannot tell the difference, and just see it as an upgrade from standard DVD anyways when playing back on their Blu-ray players.
The MPA warns that because blank DVDs can be had for, on average, 30 cents a unit, the pirates are making a huge profit on every bootleg sold.
"We are concerned and are assigning priority to this issue,"said Mike Ellis, the Asia-Pacific managing director for the MPA.
According to Crunchgear, Apple has begun buildingHDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) into their new MacBooks in order to protect iTunes Store purchased media.
Although most content are not protected, there are some newer videos that are and will not play at all unless you have connected an HDCP compliant TV or monitor.
Users trying to connect to a TV via HDMI or DVI should be fine, but users with VGA or component/composite ports only may have issues.
Sony Computer Entertainment America has proudly announced that there are now 14 million active PSN accounts worldwide, matching the 14 million active users Xbox Live currently has. It is important to note however that XBL originally launched in 2002 but also costs money for a subscription. PSN is free.
As of July, Sony only had 10 million registered users who had downloaded 170 million pieces of content. That has now grown to 14 million and 273 million pieces of content.
"With 14 million active accounts and 273 million pieces of content downloaded, we know that you're thirsting for this digital entertainment,"said John Koller, director of hardware marketing for SCEA.
"PlayStation Network has truly hit its stride with unique downloadable games and a video delivery service featuring movies, TV shows, and original programming that you can watch in HD with your PS3, or bring with you on your PSP."
The popular DVR company TiVo has announced that it has teamed up with Domino's Pizza to allow subscribers to order pizza right from their TV sets, free of charge. (You will still have to pay for the food obviously).
"This is the first time in history that the 'on-demand' generation will be able to fully experience couch commerce by ordering pizza directly through their television set," said Rob Weisberg, vice president of precision and print marketing at Domino's.
Weisberg added that TiVo users will see a Domino's ad and be able to click on "I want it" from their TV remote.
Consumers can enter their delivery address as well as crust type and sauce through the TV and expect their food within 30 minutes.
Domino's added that subscribers can set up a user-name and password for Dominos.com and use it place orders faster.
The infamoustorrenttrackerThe Pirate Bay has smashed through another new milestone, reaching 25 million unique peers. It has been estimated that the site tracks over 50 percent of all BitTorrent users that are on at any point.
In 2006 the site tracked 3 million peers which moved up to 6 million peers by November 2007. In April of this year, TPB admin and founder Brokep noted that they had hit 12 million peers. The growth has been exponential and does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Admin Peter Sunde added that there was previously limits on how many peers the site could track but those have been lifted thanks to new changes. “I wish we had lots and lots of money so we could just buy like 10 servers and another gigabit,” he jokingly added.
A new survey published by the The National Research Institute of Legal Policy shows that about 70 percent of teenage Finns have used or currently use file-sharing applications to download copyrighted material.
Online piracy was far and away the largest form of ‘criminal behavior’ among the Finnish youth. 6 percent smoke marijuana or has, 11 percent have participated in a fight, and 15 percent have stolen something from their school or someone else.
29 percent of those who reported downloading unauthorized content also admitted they download movies or music every single day from file sharing services.
Finnish pro-piracy group Piraattiliitto said, “There is an almost unanimous call from the readers to legalize private filesharing. The overwhelming change in the national opinion from anti-piracy to pro-piracy is somewhat surprising, even for us at Piraattiliitto.”
The Finnish copyright lobby however said the results of the survey were "alarming" and they are looking to pass new laws that will "allow copyright holders to force ISPs to pass their threatening emails to the alleged filesharing customers."
Richard Craig Lissaman of Calgary has become the first Canadian convicted under new movie pirating legislation for his decision to film the movie "Sweeney Todd" at a local movie theater last year.
Lissaman pleaded guilty on Friday and was sentenced to 12 months probation and a large fine of $1500 CAD.
The guilty party is now also banned from going to any movie theater as well as from owning video recording equipment (including a cell phone with the capability) while he is on probation.
Judge Skene said that Lissman's crime was comparable to someone shoplifitng a cart of meat knowing that they will resell it for a profit.
"You can say he and his pals will watch the movie, but he has an item that is more supportive of taking something to be used to make a profit,"said the judge.
"It's not a simple theft of an item for personal consumption."
The motion picture industry was delighted by the ruling and admitted they spent six months investigating before having the authorities arrest Lissaman.
"Canada is a hotbed of movie pirating, which is a billion-dollar loss to the movie industry," Mark Christiansen, executive vice-president of operations for Paramount Picture's motion picture distribution.
According to a new Leichtman Research study, one-third of all Americans now own an HDTV, putting market penetration at an all-time high. The number has doubled from 2006's figures.
Just over 22 percent of all US homes purchased a new HDTV in the last 12 months, and about 48 percent spent over $1000 USD for their new TV.
"About 40 million U.S. households now have at least one HDTV set, and LRG forecasts that this number will double over the next four years,"noted Bruce Leichtman, President and principal analyst of Leichtman Research. "While more people than ever before have HDTV sets, educating consumers on HD programming remains an issue.
HDTV prices, whether they be for DLP, LCD or plasma screens, have been dropping exponentially over the past two years and 42 inch screens with full 1080p HD resolution can be found for under $1000 depending on the brand.
The popular Canadian retailer Future Shop has announced they have dropped the price of the Zune 8GB to $100 CAD, down from $150.
The deal will last for the next week on all colors and will prove to be a large undercut on American retailers and other Canadian retailers' current prices. As of September, Microsoft's official MSRP for the product is $150 CAD.
It is unclear whether Microsoft or Future Shop prompted the deal but it is odd to see a product at such a high discount while it is still relatively new and not a clearance item.
Future Shop is also selling the 120GB model Zune for $234 CAD, $16 CAD lower than the MSRP.
Microsoft has announced that it expects the Xbox 360 to outsell the total sales of the original Xbox by November, surpassing 25 million units worldwide.
Mindy Mount, corporate VP and CFO of the company's Entertainment and Devices division, says "so far we've done a great job appealing to the core gamers. And by the end of this month we expect our global installed base to reach 25 million units, surpassing that of the first Xbox.
"It's a great milestone for us, but still only a start when you consider that history shows three-quarters of a console's sales come at a price of USD 199 or lower. We hit that sweet spot in September, making our Arcade model USD 50 cheaper than the Wii and half the price of a PlayStation 3."
Mount also correctly noted that the recent across the board price cut has had a huge impact on sales around the world. "In the US in September our console sales rose 42 per cent month over month, and in Europe they rose 62 per cent," she added. "In Japan we've had over a 500 per cent increase in sales."
Netflix has posted on their site that beginning on December 15th they will no longer ship HD DVD titles, leaving Blu-ray as the consumer's only HD format of choice.
In February the company stopped purchasing HD DVD movies when Blu-ray won the HD format war but have kept renting out their current stock to those who wanted it.
On December 15th, if you have any HD DVD titles in your queue, they will be replaced with their standard definition counterpart.
There was no word on what Netflix will do with all the HD DVDs after the fact. Hopefully they will go on firesale.
Teosto (Finnish Composers' Copyright Society) has officially requested that USB drives and mobile phones with MP3 playback function should join the products -- such as DVDs and DVRs -- with a recording/storage device royalty fee. Teosto has been fighting for the right to add the fees to mobile phones for two years now and now they want both external hard drives and thumb drives included as well. The proposal will now travel to Ministry of Education where the final decision is made.
Teosto has claimed that extensive amounts of copyrighted recordings are copied to both USB drives and mobile phones each year and therefore the composers have a right for a proper compensation. The fees would increase mobile phone prices up to 12,60 euros (approx. $16) for music phones such as the Nokia's new touch-screen XpressMusic 5800 and presumably Apple iPhone.
Last year the same happened to HD DVD and Blu-ray discs that carry nowadays a fee of up to 1,89 euros per disc.
According to a new ABI Research report, the amount of Web-enabled electronics will at least triple in the next five years, allowing more and more consumers to connect to the Internet via their video game consoles, TVs and Blu-ray players.
There are currently 60 million electronics components worldwide that are Web-enabled and ABI says there will be over 200 million by 2013. Internet-protocol-enabled TVs, which are the standard in Japan, will become commonplace in the USA, adds the report.
"One of the main facets of multi-screen offerings will be Web-based user interfaces and rich Web content across all three screens," ABI research director Michael Wolf said in a statement. "Beyond the PC and mobile environment is the Internet-connected TV screen."
More and more TV makers are integrating Ethernet ports into their TVs and Profile 2.0 Blu-ray players are doing the same.
Companies such as Netflix have encouraged the pushing of Internet capability by signing deals to have digital copies of movies streamed directly through Blu-ray players or TVs.
Nintendo sold 803,210 Wii consoles in the United States for the month of October, marking a large jump from last month.
According to figures from market research firm NPD, the Nintendo had better supply for its hit console and increased sales from 687,000 units last month.
Sales of the Sony PlayStation 3 fell again from 232,400 units in September to 190,000 for October. Because of a recent across the board price cut, the Microsoft Xbox 360 saw a decent sized sales jump from 347,200 units in September to 371,000 for October
“The price reduction on the Xbox 360 is paying dividends at retail as the platform realized a 7% unit sales increase over September,”said analyst Anita Frazier. “Keeping in mind that September was a five-week month while October had four [weeks], the sales pace increased 33%.”
Electronic Arts, seeing the huge popularity of Nintendo's Wii Fit , has announced they will be releasing their own fitness game, EA Sports Active next March for the Wii console.
The game will have tennis, boxing, soccer and other sports which gamers can play using wireless controllers attached to their arms and legs.
The game will retail for $60 USD and will include a book on healthy eating.
Electronista says Sports Active "centers around a pair of leg straps that hold both the Wii remote and nunchuk in place as well as a single resistance band for the upper body. The set lets Nintendo's own controllers properly track exercise across the whole body and also introduce enough physical stress to provide strength-based exercise."
Microsoft has proudly announced that the blockbuster Gears of War 2 has sold over 2 million units worldwide in its first weekend despite being available on torrents and other P2P for well over a week.
The Major Nelson site has also revealed that 1.5 million Xbox Live account owners played the game during that first weekend, playing a record 15 million gameplay hours total and unlocking 19 million achievements as well.
"We were so excited to launch Gears of War 2 on the same day all around the world, something virtually unheard of in the games business," said Cliff Bleszinski, design director at Epic Games.
"We wanted our fans, no matter where they live, to have a shared experience on day one, and that’s exactly what’s happened."
Netflix has announced the hiring of former Macrovision Solutions executive Greg Peters in an effort to secure more video-streaming deals.
Peters will become VP of partner product development and report to current Netflix chief product officer Neil Hunt.
"Greg's expertise in all aspects of the product development lifecycle—from vision to design to implementation—will be a significant asset to Netflix and our partners as we push toward our goal of eventually enabling all U.S. households to stream Netflix to their TVs," Hunt said.
Netflix has gone on a tear recently securing deals with Samsung, TiVo, Microsoft, Disney and Starz, all in an effort to boost their "Watch Instantly" streaming service. The library currently has over 12,000 titles available with another 3000 titles expected by the end of the year.
Google-owned Youtube has introduced a new ad platform to turn the heads of advertisers. In addition to traditional text ads YouTube now allows search term based adverts that are displayed on the top of the search results. Like the ones on Google search the YouTube search term ads are separated from the actual results by their background color.
Costing Google a hefty $1.76 billion YouTube has not yet turned into a money making machine. However, the integration of the new ad platform was not as an easy task as one could've thought.
"In hindsight, it is a natural transition for YouTube to make. We've been working on this for months. The key was, we wanted to make sure we got it right. There are a lot of intricacies involved. YouTube is a video discovery platform. We've been integrating with Google AdWords for some time, and now we're at a place where it can be win and win," said YouTube product manager Matthew Liu to CNET News.
There are no limitations regarding who can buy the ads but due to the formula used to determine ad placements - combining popularity of the video and money paid - companies will most likely buy off the most popular search terms. There will be however a chance to buy yourself the 15 seconds - or minutes in this case - of fame.
One of the largest BitTorrent sites on the Internet, TorrentValley.com, has been shut down in a raid by Bulgarian authorities. The so-called Cyber Crime Unit got tipped off by the Bulgarian Association of Musical Producers (BAMP).
"Torrentvalley was a major international source of copyright infringing material. This site was a gate towards more than 5 000 torrent-trackers from all over the world. The decisive action by the authorities shows that Bulgaria is no haven for copyright abuse in Internet and makes efforts to protect the rights of those involved in the creative industries," said the BAMP representative Ina Kileva.
The press release by IFPI estimates that TorrentValley aided the distribution of more than one million copyright infringing files.
This is not the first time Bulgarian authorities have acted against BitTorrent sites. In 2006 police arrested the admin of Arenabg.com, who was soon released due to lack of evidence.
Last year a Minnesota woman became the first person ever to lose a P2P copyright infringement case to the RIAA. It was initially heralded as a victory for the RIAA's argument that simply offering files for download violated copyright holders' exclusive rights. But after Thomas appealed the decision she was granted a new trial based on the judge's determination that the RIAA's legal theory was directly contradicted by everything from legislative intent to prior caselaw. But instead of getting her day in court she's once again fighting for her new trial as the RIAA looks to appeal her appeal.
Confused yet? Well that's probably the point. In fact, like much of what RIAA lawyers claim, their justification for appealing the decision doesn't seem to have much in common with the facts. It goes something like this.
The entire "making available" claim is based on a number of cases involving secondary infringement. In each of those cases the defendant was a third party who contributed to someone else's copyright infringement. In setting aside the original judgement and ordering a new trial Judge Michael J. Davis said as much.
Sandisk has added a new model to their Sansa Clip line of MP3 players. This new addition features 8GB of storage and will have a MSRP of $99.99. It joins existing models with 2GB and 4GB capacity which retail for $39.99 and $59.99 respectively.
The Sansa Clip is a line of small flash-based music portable music players. It's small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It weights less than an ounce and is designed to be clipped to clothing, a backpack, or a purse.
Audio formats supported include MP3, WMA, and WAV. They also feature a built in voice recorder and FM tuner.
Nokia Vietnam is being sued by that country's equivalent of the RIAA, the Recording Industry Assotiation of Vietnam (RIAV) over downloads they're offering to mobile phone owners as part of a promotion.
The case is somewhat strange since the songs in question are being provided to Nokia by another company, FPT Telecom. What makes it odd is that the RIAV doesn't seem to be going after FPT Telecom for selling the music to Nokia.
“We want to directly solve the case with Nokia. As a matter of fact, we will independently work with FPT Online about another matter,”said RIAV’s Vice Chairwoman, Truong Thi Thu Dung.
Perhaps it's simply a question of going after the company with the deepest pockets. Or maybe it's because they're already suing FPT Telecom over content on their IPTV service and want to maximize the damages for each.
And maybe they just don't expect to get their money from FPT, who Dung has described as “uncooperative.”
Facebook has noted that use of its Facebook Mobile products have tripled since the end of 2007 and that the popularity has caught the company off guard.
Wayne Chang, an engineer on Facebook's mobile team, wrote today that use increased from 5 million active users to a current 15 million.
BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm and Windows Mobile users can access Facebook through dedicated third party apps and normal mobile phone users can access the site via any mobile browser.
Because of the increased growth in mobile usage, Facebook has now expanded its mobile team and will continue to improve the features of the offering.
Microsoft has confirmed that they are once again banning users of modified consoles from Xbox Live.
Quoting the Xbox team,I’ve gotten a few messages and seen some forum threads pop up on console bannings so I thought I’d post and let folks know what’s up. In our our continued effort to keep gameplay safe and secure for our community of more than 14 million members, Microsoft has taken action against a small percentage of Xbox 360 consoles that have been illegally modified in order to play pirated games. You should know that modifying your Xbox 360 console is also a violation of the Xbox LIVE terms of use, will void your warranty and result in a ban from Xbox LIVE. The health of the video game business depends on customers paying for the genuine products and services they receive, both from manufacturers and the local companies that support them. We will continue to employ and bolster anti-piracy security measures to counter piracy in the gaming industry and improve security in the Xbox LIVE community.
Live Nation, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars attracting acts such as U2, Jay-Z, Nickelback and Madonna has announced it will soon begin selling DRM-free MP3s from artist's individual pages. So far, three of the Big 4 labels have signed on with Live Nation.
Live Nation has also confirmed it will be setting up its own ticketing service to compete with Ticketmaster and the company can now claim that it handles everything from merchandise to distribution and every step in between.
Sony Music, Universal Music Group and EMI have all signed on and negotiations with the last major label are still in progress. Artist have complained that iTunes, the current market share leader, does not have strong "artist pages" and lose sales because of it.
"Looking ahead, our primary goal remains centered on maximizing our global concert pipe for our client – the artist,"explained president and CEO Michael Rapino, "and expanding into direct ticketing/online distribution, completing the world's only concert-to-fan direct platform for artists."
In an effort to spur added holiday sales, Orange France has cut the price of the 8GB model iPhone 3G from 149 euros to 99 euros when bought new with contract and data plan.
The price cut on the 16GB model wasn't confirmed but reports have said it will drop from 199 euros to 129.
The promotion, called internally the "Christmas Origami star," will last from November 13th until January 14th.
European prices for the iPhone 3G have never been this low but does bring back memories of last June when carriers slashed the price of the first generation iPhone to 99 euros or cheaper in an effort to clear out stock.
Aiming to convert physical DVD bargain hunters to digital copy owners, Apple has set up a special "This Week's Great Movies Under $5" page on iTunes that will offer a few movies every week for $4.99 USD, a steep discount from their normal price point.
For the inaugural week, there are mainly older action movies such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Last Action Hero, Air Force One and The Karate Kid.
Although Apple has not made clear how long each discounted movie will last on the page, we can assume that it will be only for the one week period of Tuesday to Tuesday.
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) UK boss Ray Maguire has said that Sony must work harder on promoting the cross-platform functionality between its home console, the PlayStation 3 (PS3) and the PlayStation Portable (PSP). When the PS3 was first launched, more emphasis was put on the functionality between the two devices than now, as the focus has moved more towards the game line-up than PS3 features in order to boost sales.
"When we first started - because all the functionality [on the PS3] was radical - we talked about that functionality," he told GamesIndustry.biz last month. "And in doing that, maybe we weren't strong enough on the games side of it. Now, with the strength of the games we've got coming out, this Christmas we're definitely about the games. From our own first party, and also third party, there's a feast of games for PS3 this year."
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has praised anti-piracy raids targeted counterfeit games in Mexico. Mexico's law enforcement carried out raids that led to the seizure of about 20 tons of pirate video games. About 40 officers from he region's Procuraduría General de la República and Agencia Federal de Investigación organisations raided booths and uncovered 91,200 fake games products.
Mexican law enforcement officials operated in conjunction with local ESA representatives to conduct this raid. "Piracy in markets such as San Juan de Dios hurts businesses engaging in the legitimate distribution and retailing of computer and video games,"said Michael D Gallagher, CEO of the ESA.
He continued: "We commend Mexican law enforcement officials for their actions in this raid and are committed to fully supporting authorities around the world who conduct these kinds of enforcement actions."
A recent update to AVG 8 has caused massive headaches for its owner and for many users who ended up with a crippled Windows XP operating system. At the core of the problem is a false positive of user32.dll, a vital Windows Operating System file, which the updated AVG 8 reported as a trojan horse. Upon the false detection, the AVG update prompted the user to delete the file to fix the problem, which in turn could result in Windows XP endlessly rebooting.
The problem affected the Windows XP operating system with SP2 or SP3 installed. It didn't affect systems using Windows XP in the English language, but affected Windows installations using the Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish languages. Upon noticing the problem, an update to fix it was immediately pushed out.
"AVG is actively working to remedy the problem some users are experiencing related to the most recent update to commercial and free versions of AVG 7.5 and AVG 8.0 in some languages. A number of users who installed the update mistakenly received a warning that the Windows system file user32.dll product version 5.1.2600.3099 was infected with a Trojan virus and were prompted to delete a file essential to the operation of Windows XP." a company representative said.
NVIDIA has introduced the latest version of its Quadro GFX card for the business sector. The Quadro FX 5800 marks the first time that a GFX card has been loaded with 4GB of graphics memory. Even NVIDIA's dual GPU enthusiast video cards like the 9800 GX2 only sport 2GB of memory. "The size and complexity of data is growing at an exponential rate. The challenge for today's professional is to make sense of the mountain of data by distilling it into a form they can comprehend, analyze, and use to make impactful decisions," NVIDIA's Jeff Brown, GM of professional solutions said in a statement.
He continued: "At stake can be billions of investment dollars, or even people's lives. The Quadro FX 5800 has advanced features to allow massive datasets to be viewed beyond traditional 3D enabling professionals to make fast and accurate decisions." The FX 5800 offers up to 240 CUDA programmable parallel cores and supports interactive 4D modeling with time-lapse capability.
The FX 5800 supports both Open GL and DirectX 10 applications. NVIDIA says the level of performance offered by the new powerful card is needed for demanding environments like oil/gas exploration and medical imaging. The technology comes with a sobering MSRP of $3,499.
Last year the U.S. Military moved to block access to YouTube from troops and government employees, citing bandwidth usage problems with the services. Now, in co-operation with Seattle startup Delve Networks, it has launched a video sharing website for troops, their families and supporters. Members of the branches of the armed forces, their families, civilian Defense Department employees and supporters can join the service and upload videos.
TroopTube is tightly monitored however, with all video submissions being reviewed by Pentagon employees before they are added to filter out everything from threats to national security to copyright infringing content. Delve developed the technology to approve and sort incoming videos, as well as technology that makes several different video sizes and streams whichever is best suited for the users' Internet connection.
Delve Chief Executive Alex Castro called TroopTube a "retention tool" which is aimed at a new generation of soldiers who bring laptops and other portable gadgets to the front line with them. "A lot of people are excited in the company to be doing something for the people who make sacrifices," said Castro. "We're proud of this."
While the sale of video games dropped 21 percent in the third quarter in Japan, sales reported in the UK and the United States continued to grow despite the very visible economic woes. NPD Group, GfK Chart-Track Ltd. and Enterbrain Inc. all reported that video game sales grew by 15 percent in the third quarter and 8 percent in the United States. Overall, the sales of the three combined markets rose just 1 percent with Japan keeping the figure down.
"2007 was a banner year for the Japanese software market with the titles released in the third quarter of 2008 not being as highly anticipated as those released during the same time period in 2007," said Ricky Tanimoto, a global marketing analyst at Enterbrain. "Also, software titles generally have stronger launch sales in Japan, which represent a large percentage of the total sales in Japan compared to the US and Britain."
He said that overall video games sales in Japan will be largely unaffected by economic problems during the holiday season. "New portable hardware systems like Sony's PSP-3000 and Nintendo's DSi will prove to be driving market forces in Japan throughout the 2008 holiday season," he said. The UK market is gearing up for its best-ever fourth quarter performance.
In a panel discussion Tuesday at the HD3 conference in Century City, industry figures with a stake in the Blu-ray Disc format raised concerns over how the economy will hit the Blu-ray format over the holidays. Now that the format war is over and a lot of money has been put into promoting Blu-ray through retailers, the format's backers had hoped for a strong performance this holiday season.
"The economy is the biggest challenge, because there are just so many pieces to the Blu-ray puzzle that consumers face," said Lori MacPherson, GM of domestic home-entertainment at Disney. "You need the high-definition television set, you need the player, you need the cables, you need the software..." MacPherson still believes Disney's seasonal slew of new releases and catalog titles in the Blu-ray format will help move consumers towards the format.
"The economy is hitting everybody," said Danny Kaye, executive vp research and tech strategy at Fox. "But we still look forward to a great fourth quarter." There is good news on the horizon however for high-definition video equipment. "I know the economy is tough right now, but the manufacturers are really bringing down the price of their HDTV sets,"Paramount vp marketing Chris Saito said.
Warner Bros. has pulled its DVD marketing and distribution operation in South Korea and is handing over the business to a local licensee. The move seems to be in response to rampant Internet piracy in South Korea where 94 percent of homes have high-speed broadband connections. The company made the announcement in a statement on Tuesday.
The company said it would make the transition in the coming weeks. This news comes just two months after Warner announced it would provide pre-release low-cost movie rentals on the Internet up to two weeks before they are released on DVD. The VOD service is meant to compete with piracy.
The company said its commitment to the South Korean market remains as strong as ever. However, it's latest move shows the struggle Hollywood studios have in countries like South Korea. An industry source said that the rampant piracy "creates a more challenging marketplace" than in other countries.
Circuit City Stores, Inc. announced on Monday that it had received approval for its first day motions from the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond. The motions filed on the 10th by Circuit City as part of voluntary filing for reorganization relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code. Circuit City received court approval for a $1.1 billion debtor-in-possession ("DIP") revolving credit facility to supplement its working capital and provide additional liquidity while it works to reorganize the business.
This financing is being provided by the lenders of Circuit City's current asset-based credit facility and enables the company to pay vendors and other business partners in the ordinary course for goods and services received after the filing. Circuit City received authority to continue to make wage and salary payments and continue various benefits for
associates as well as honor customer programs, such as returns, exchanges and gift cards, and other pre-petition customer obligations.
"We are pleased to have obtained court approval for our first day motions, a critical first step in Circuit City's reorganization process," said James A. Marcum, vice chairman and acting president and chief executive officer of Circuit City Stores, Inc. "These approvals will help position us for a more successful holiday selling season and allow us to operate our business and serve our valued guests without interruption as we work to emerge from Chapter 11 as quickly as possible."
Marking the first time they have ever done so, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced that the two-disc DVD and Blu-ray offerings of the comedy Pineapple Express will include a free digital copy of the film downloadable from iTunes in addition to the digital copy that can playback on PCs and the Sony handheld PSP.
Previous Sony digital copies had not been compatible with Apple devices such as the iPod or iPhone nor on Mac computers.
Sony says it will offer iTunes downloads on a "select basis" for now on.
“SPHE is thrilled to expand the value and convenience of our digital copy program to the iTunes community,”said Lexine Wong, senior VP of worldwide marketing at Sony. “Consumers can enjoy Pineapple Express where and how they like—whether with the full home entertainment experience of Blu-ray high def or DVD or on the go with their laptop, PSP or iPod.”
The blogger allegedly had been streaming songs from the still unreleased new Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" on his site for some time.
Despite saying he would plead not guilty last month, it appears Cogill has changed his mind and will now plead guilty to one federal count of copyright infringement. Because the case was being treated as a misdemeanor and not a felony, Cogill faced up to one year in prison as well as a fine.
Due to his clean criminal record and the plea bargain, Cogill will likely face only 1 month of jail time. More importantly will be whether Cogill will be forced to reveal the source of the nine tracks he uploaded.
According to Video Business, the box office smash hit The Dark Knight can add another milestone to its list, highest selling HD title of all time.
Although the movie isn't set for release until December 9th, Warner is believed to be shipping 1.1 million units of the film for its launch date, the first time a Blu-ray film has ever hit the 1 million milestone.
Although accurate figures for Blu-ray sales are hard to come by, 'The Dark Knight' is expected to be the highest seller in the format's short history, surpassing previous trend setters Casino Royale, Transformers and Iron Man.
Casino Royale was the first HD title to sell 100,000 units (back in March 2007), and Transformers was supposedly the first HD title to ever hit 500,000, also in 2007. More recently, Iron Man smashed any previous Blu-ray record by selling an estimated 782,000 units in its first week.
VUDU has announced today via a press release that they now offer the largest HD library on the planet, 1150 titles.
The company noted they reached the milestone by adding 600 new titles in October, both in regular HD and the company's high-end HDX format.
Overall, VUDU offers over 10,000 titles, with 1150 of those being available in HD or HDX.
"This is only the beginning of our effort," said Edward Lichty, Executive Vice President of Content at VUDU. "We plan to maintain a leadership position in offering the best picture quality experience and the deepest library anywhere when it comes to HD."
VUDU is in direct competition with the crowded HD streaming marketplace which includes major players Apple, Netflix and more.
2Wire has introduced its new MediaPointset-top box that will deliver high definition content via a broadband connection.
The media hub can connect to home networks through wired or wireless connections and can also be remotely accessed via the Internet.
The box's built-in USB ports allow users to stream all types of video and audio content from flash drives or external hard drives and the device is compatible with UPnP- and DLNA-enabled devices.
Electronista says the box will offer Internet browsing capability through your TV set but the interface method is unknown at this point. Internet radio is another interesting feature you will be able to access from the device.
The device will not be available to consumers directly and instead will come through ISPs such as Comcast and AT&T who purchase them, and "then offer specific content and options for the MediaPoint under their own respective brands."
Finally putting an end to weeks of rumors, Blockbuster has announced they will be building a set-top box that can stream digital movies to user's TVs.
The move can be seen as a way for the struggling company to compete with rival Netflix which has been making deal after deal to add to their streaming library.
Blockbuster CEO, Jim Keyes, added that the device will be brand associated with its Movielink rental and purchase service but did not disclose any other details. For the time being, cost, hardware and software specs and release date are unknown but Keyes did note the box would be available for the holiday season.
The new device may be too little too late for Blockbuster however as Netflix has had their own set top box (the Netflix player by Roku) available for almost a year. Netflix has also recently signed a deal with Microsoft to have its subscribers stream movies free of charge on Xbox 360 consoles.
The results of a study from ABI Research on the affects of age on technology use show an interesting, and perhaps somewhat unexpected trend. It's no shock to find that people age 65 and older are less likely to use things like Video on Demand (VOD) or game consoles than those between 18 and 25. What may surprise you is that people in the older demographic may be just as likely to adopt new technology once they try it out.
For example, the study found that although only 35% of people age 65 or higher have used VOD, compared to double that number between the ages of 25 and 29, in both cases those who use it once typically continue to use it at least once a month afterward.
The results for console use were even more surprising. While market penetration in the 18-25 demographic saw no growth over the last year, for those 65 and older there was a 200% increase. This may explain the trend toward increased gaming related sales offsetting falling home video revenue.
But there are still some technologies that don't show any signs of appealing to the older crowd. Video downloads, while popular with very young people, isn't showing any signs of popularity with even middle aged consumers.
Perhaps the biggest loss in the transition from physical media to downloaded music is the extras packaged with CDs. Just as the transition from records to cassette tapes and CDs meant the end of some types of content that didn't work in the smaller medium, the movement to CD means the elimination of much of it entirely. Some people who miss this extra content would like to see someone find a replacement.
The band Fall Out Boy and their label, Island Records, think they've come up with something that fits the bill. They've updated the idea of liner notes and produced an iPhone application that will be offered through the iTunes App Store prior to the release of their new album, "Folie a Deux," due to be available on December 16.
The application will include a web-like interface that provides interactive liner notes including photos and lyrics from the upcoming album as well as past releases. And of course there will also be links to buy their music from iTunes. The band will also be able to provide future updates like social networking features to keep fans in touch with the band and even help them find each other via the iPhone 3G's built in GPS.
As popular as the iPhone has been, one important feature that has been missing is the ability to share its mobile internet connection with a computer. Reports from the Web 2.0 Summit seem to indicate that's about to change. Several sources are reporting that AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph De La Vega told tech columnist Michael Arrington an official method for tethering the iPhone to a computer to act as a modem is on the way.
In July an application called NetShare was added to the iTunes App Store for tethering an iPhone to a computer via a wireless network connection. Within hours it mysteriously disappeared. Although there was no official explanation from Apple, it was most likely removed to keep AT&T customers from using it. Although there are other phones that can already be tethered to use as modems, doing so without a separate data plan for your computer violates AT&T's Terms of Service.
Specifically, the TOS state "plans(unless specifically designated for tethering usage) cannot be used for any applications that tether the device (through use of, including without limitation, connection kits, other phone/PDA-to computer accessories, Bluetooth or any other wireless technology) to Personal Computers (including without limitation, laptops), or other equipment for any purpose."
The Xiph.Org Foundation has just announced the release of Theora 1.0. Theora is an open source video codec designed to be a royalty free alternative to high compression formats like MPEG-4.
Theora is based on the proprietary VP3 codec developed by On2 Technologies, but is licensed under a BSD-style license. This means it doesn't have any of the common open source restrictions on commercial software like forcing derivative works to also be released under as open source.
Even though the format itself has been unchanged since 2004, as the first official stable release Theora 1.0 is still a major milestone. In order to attract the interest of commercial software and especially hardware developers stability, or at least the perception of stability, is an important consideration.
Another aspect of Theora its developers hope will be significant is its relatively low CPU footprint. That makes it particularly suitable for mobile devices like smartphones and portable media players.
For some reason the ever increasing crowd of people in search for the ultimate media player have been disappointed by one application after another. The task is not a simple one for the developers as the complete package should feature an easy-to-use and comprehensive user interface, support for nearly every file format and punch to run the finest Full HDresolution. So far we haven't come across a device or program that fully meets these requirements. Xbox 360 let the XBMC fanatics down as did PS3 and its limited file support. PC hardware-based HTPCs usually require more or less advanced setups and UI lessons for the non-tech-savvy family members.
Plex is designed to deliver just about everything we need from a media player. Plex (OSXBMC) is a Mac OS X version of the XBMC media player (XBox Media Center) which was considered to be the best media player before it became obsolete due to a lack of support for Full HD video or digital video outputs. In addition, the hard to find Xbox needs to be modified with a modchip or a software mod to run XBMC. The developers of Plex promise a complete format support and an extensive appearance customization.
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Dell Inc. will not bring a mini MP3 player to the market this year tied to online entertainment software before the holidays. The company has reportedly been testing a prototype of a mini-MP3 player that is based on the company's Zing software. The MP3 player had been expected to show up sometime during the fall of 2008.
The Zing software is designed solely for entertainment content that is acquired over the Internet. It downloads and organized movie and music content. The Wall Street Journal cites a source familiar with the matter as saying the company has decided to hold off on releasing the music player indefinitely, but to continue to develop and push its Zing software project.
Is there anything you can't blame video games for? A recent trial saw a 19 year old sentenced for multiple sex attacks against women. The teenager from Ashford, Kent reportedly took to the streets drunk and stoned looking for women. In one case he broke the arm of a woman in her 40s by dragging her down a hill before sexually assaulting her. In a search of his home, police found a video game that they evidently thought was significant enough to note.
It was, of course, one of the Grand Theft Auto series of games. Remembering that the teenager was reportedly drunk and high at the times of the two attacks that he admitted, the Prosecutor, Eleanor Laws (yes, the Prosecutor!) noted that the amount of time the defendant spent playing the game "may go some way to explaining his attitude towards women."
Perhaps the prosecutor should consider another line of work where her opinion is professional and not intended to make an excuse for a sex offender as she did, in fact, weigh in on a debate that is unresolved by experts who actually study it. He is also 19 years old, this is not a case of a minor being exposed to a game rated for an adult. He is an adult. Or maybe I am wrong, and the Prosecutor only intended it as personal opinion.
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) Studios will reportedly provide full-length feature files and TV content on Google's YouTube video sharing service. It was reported early last week that YouTube was preparing to add this type of content after spending months mending its relationship with Hollywood studios. On Sunday, news circulated that MGM will be the first studio (and most likely not the last) to add full-length content to the popular video site.
YouTube currently has a deal with Lionsgate, but it only stretches to short clips from films and TV shows. The deal, if the reports are accurate, signals a turning point for YouTube since it has largely been a headache for Hollywood studios since it first launched. After Google acquired YouTube, it refused to take responsibility for copyright infringing content posted by its users, citing the DMCA itself as protection.
Since then, it has made moves to remove pirated video content from its site at the convenience of the content owner. The reason for the change of heart is suspected to be Hulu, a video service already loaded with premium content that reportedly makes as much ad revenue as YouTube with only a fraction of the users. YouTube might have the numbers of users and reputation to compete, but it had to smooth over its relationship with the content companies first.
Chinese Internet censorship is hardly something new, but lately it seems the country has targeted BitTorrent sites. Last week, users in China reported that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, Pirate Bay and isoHunt were redirecting to Chinese search site Baidu.com. China recently started to ban 10 video sharing sites for "regulations violations" and the eDonkey indexing site VeryCD received warnings shortly before being re-directed to Baidu.com.
The domain hijacks continued for a few days until they were seemingly lifted. Official explanation for the outage is a "DNS error", yet that is very improbable as it seemed to affect the P2P sites exclusively which are hosted all across the world. DNS errors wouldn't explain why they were all linked to another (the same) site either.
Of course, its far more likely that the block was intentional. The only question is whether it was because of piracy or because of some content that could be gotten from any of the sites was specifically targeted by the government.
U.S. Researchers informed an American Heart Association meeting in New Orleans about the possible interference that MP3 player headphones might post to cardiac equipment. Pacemakers and implantable defibrillators' normal operation can be changed when in close proximity to headphones used with MP3 player equipment. Previously it has been found that MP3 players themselves don't interfere with cardiac equipment.
The reason the headphones have been found to cause disturbance with the equipment is the strong little magnets inside. When placed within 1.2 inches of the cardiac equipment, it was found to cause interference in about a quarter of tested patents. Fourteen out of sixty experienced problems when tested, with interference being twice as likely with defibrillators than pacemakers.
A pacemaker changes the speed of cardiac rhythm using electric impulses. The headphones in close proximity however could make it deliver a signal no matter what the heart rate is, possibly leading to palpitations or arrhythmia. An implantable cardioverter defibrillator signals the heart to normalize a rhythm whenever it gets fast or slow. The magnetic disturbance could make it ignore an abnormal heart rhythm.
Koch Entertainment Distribution, one of the fastest-growing independent music companies in the U.S, has announced that it will make over 2,600 hours of video available through Apple's iTunes platform.
The content will include fitness, foreign, horror, documentary, TV, special interest, classics, children’s, anime and independent film genres.
There will be programming available from Koch, Koch Vision, Koch Lorber Films labels, Passport Entertainment, Cinema Epoch, Lifesize Entertainment and more.
VB says the titles now available for download are the music video Hatebreed: Live Dominance, Chop Shop, High Times Presents: The Cannabis Cup, Les Paul: Chasing Sound, Monster Camp, Secrets of Mary Magdalene, the Sundance Channel’s Terminal City and Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers: The Collection Vol. 1.
“Making key titles from our home video library available on iTunes helps position Koch as the premier independent aggregator in the digital distribution space with the broadest distribution network of any independent,” noted Michael Rosenberg, president of Koch Entertainment Distribution.
BitTorrent Inc. has had a rough year. The company looking to make revenue from Bram Cohen's file sharing software is just another company struggling in today's turbulent economic climate. The company announced on Firday that it cut about half of its staff, and replaced its CEO Doug Walker. The company already experienced a 22% layoff back in August this year.
Eric Klinker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) has been named as Walker's replacement. He has "two decades of networking, content delivery, and management experience." Walker had left Alias Systems just last year to take up the CEO position at BitTorrent.
"Klinker has...been instrumental to the continued development of the BitTorrent client, BitTorrent's Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service, BitTorrent's Software Development Kit (SDK) and BitTorrent's proprietary advanced congestion control technology. The latter has been at the center of BitTorrent's influential discussions and well-publicized collaboration with Comcast Corporation, as it seeks to deploy a protocol-agnostic network management solution." A BitTorrent statement read.
J.D. Power and Associates has conducted research in customer satisfaction of the most popular Smartphone models. Apple Inc. has ranked highest among the smartphone makers compared to Samsung and Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM). One in four of the smartphone users reported experiencing some kind of software problem. Seemingly, devices akin to small computers are also prone to the same problems as normal computers.
"These are mini-computers, and people do experience computer-like problems on these devices," said Kirk Parsons, senior director of wireless services at J.D. Power and the author of the survey results. "They have entirely different problems than a traditional cell phone."
The smartphones tested were rated out of a 1,000-point satisfaction scale. The iPhone scored 778 / 1000 primarily because users rated the smart phone highly in four of the five areas measured. "The iPhone's claim to fame is in the physical design area," said Parsons. "The appearance of the phone, the visual aspects, the weight and size of the phone, the size of the display screen. But it got very high scores in others areas, like ease of operation."
Suppliers of Liquid-crystal Display (LCD) components have witnessed a decline in sales during October. The decrease is what was expected with an industry-wide downturn which has forced panel makers to cut back productions. After consolidated sales of NT$3.38 billion (US$102.9 million) in September this year, backlight unit (BLU) maker Radiant Opto-Electronics reported a 10% drop in October and a 13.66% on year to NT$3.01 billion.
Radiant did report that its LED BLU shipments to the notebook/netbook segment grew sequentially in October, with LED BLU shipments to large-size notebooks reaching 463,000 units last month. The figure is up from 351,000 units in September. Shipments to medium-size netbooks grew slightly from 687,000 in September to 690,000 in October.
Wah Hong Industrial, an Optical film supplier reported an 17.26% rise in consolidated sales to NT$617 million back in September, and then suffered a decline of 15.7% in consolidated revenues to NT$520 million in October. Wellypower Optronics, a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) maker announced that its October consolidated revenues fell 16.5% sequentially and 43.1% on year to NT$423 million.
In yet another example of how successful video games are becoming, the Epic title Gears of War 2 reportedly sold 2.1 million copies in its first day. VG Chartz gained early access to the sales figures of the game, which sold 1.4 million in its first day in the United States alone.
It's November 7th release puts another blockbuster on the shelves alongside the Xbox 360 console for the holiday season. Later this month Microsoft will push out a system update for the Xbox 360 that will completely change the user-interface of the console.
As impressive as the sales may be so far, last year's release of Halo 3 generated 3.8 millions sales in its first day. Providing key content at the right times during the year is vital to the success of Microsoft's console.
This year's game line-up for all three consoles is sure to generate an interesting battle between them again this year.
The combination of Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio, Sirius-XM, will begin merging channels next week. The new company has 19 million paying subscribers currently, and despite an economic downturn, it is expecting growth. A drop off in car sales is somewhat threatening to its future business prospects however. While the company is being quiet about the exact details of programming change, many stations from the previous companies are expected to be merged if they provide similar content.
There will also be new subscription offerings for each system, with XM subscribers getting Sirius content like Howard Stern and the NFL for an extra $4 per month. All existing XM radios will get the Best of Sirius package, whereas only the recently-released Sirius Starmate 5 will be able to get the Best of XM package.
The Starmate 5 will get a la carte options as well, with users able to pick their 50 - 100 favorite stations for a lower monthly fee.
Two researchers plan to provide details at next week's PacSec 2008 conference in Tokyo on how Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) is vulnerable to attack. Of course, this does not mean that WPA is as vulnerable to compromise in the same way that Wired-Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is, far from it in fact. The weakness in WPA is being reported by Martin Beck and Erik Tews, two graduate students in Germany. The attack could make it possible to compromise certain communications in less than 15 minutes.
The researchers found the weakness in the lesser of two WPA security protocol, Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP). Attackers can use the techniques to decrypt limited communications and can recover a special integrity checksum and send up to seven custom packets to clients on the network, according to SecurityFocus.
"The new attack on WPA is not a complete key recovery attack," Tews said in an email to SecurityFocus. "It just allows you to decrypt packets and inject packets with custom content. But there is only a single short-term key recovered during the attack."
According to Nielsen SoundScan, the Journey track "Don't Stop Believin'", originally released in 1981, has become the first catalog digital download in history to reach the 2 million sold milestone.
"Believin'" is at 2.03 million downloads since it reached legal download services in April 2003 and has seen increased popularity through famous placements such as during the final scene of "The Sopranos" and in episodes of "Family Guy" and "Laguna Beach." The recent addition of a new lead singer and a tour has also helped bring the song back into the spotlight.
"They are one of the most important artists we have,"Sony Music Entertainment Commercial Music Group president John Ingrassia says. "We're constantly working with the band and our team to create new products or highlight the catalog."
Ingrassia added, "We always do search engine marketing and promotion through the Web sites of TV shows or other partners, but now we can go to DSPs (digital service providers) and say, 'We can do a lot more with this if you'll work with us.'"
The infamous BitTorrenttracker, The Pirate Bay, is continuing to grow at a rapid rate. The site announced that is has reached 22 million peers this week, an increase of 10 million peers since April this year. Earlier this year, the tracker had set itself a goal of reaching 20 million peers and recently smashed that figure in much less time than was expected.
The site currently is host to over 3 million registered members and is evidently used by multiple times that figure. The site has survived attempts to shut it down from all angles, but its users have never suffered any major inconveniences or outages from those efforts. The site ridicules legal threats and other notices from legal reps of content companies and publishes them for all to see, and has had no problem standing up government pressure.
The site maintains that it is, and always has been operating legally since it does not offer any illegal content whatsoever to its users.
Panasonic presented the complete new 11-series product family of plasma televisions on Monday. The models come in 42-, 50-, 58- to 65-inch sizes support up to Full HD (1080p) High-definition video content. All are equipped with 18-bit signal processing equipment. The new TH-42PH11EK/ES has a resolution of 1,024 x 768 at 42-inch in size. Also immediately available is the TH-50PH11EK/ES 50-inch with a resolution of 1,366 x 768. Both sport 1,400cd/m2 brightness and a 15,000:1 contrast ratio.
The new TH-42PF11EK model is just 42-inch in size but offers a native resolution of 1920 x 1080, and is joined by the TH-50PF11EK (50-inch), TH-58PF11EK (58-inch) and TH-65PF11EK (65-inch) models in offering the Full HD effect. While these models have a slightly lower brightness at 1,200 cd/m2, they are marketed as having a 30,000:1 contrast ratio.
JVC has offered up a new product for anyone who is looking to go out of their way to make their home theater system a little bit different. The company has unveiled its first (and claims the world's first) home 3D projector, built for use specifically with home theater systems. The JVC DLA-RS2 model is intended for people who like an illusion of multi-dimensional movies without the need for those infamous glasses.
JVC uses D-ILA projection and stereoscopic video processing to provide the 3D effect from "compatible content" without the need for the specialized glasses. The projector can produce Full HD (1080p) content and uses second-generation SENSIO 3D technology. It is noted as managing an image contrast ratio of 30000:1.
Obviously "3D content" is required for this projector to be any way special, but of course it will also look great when connected to your DVD-Video, Blu-ray, console etc. hardware. It will debut sometime in 2009 and currently has no price details.
Panasonic received the Hollywood Post Alliance Engineering Excellence Award for its development of the AVC-Intra 100 video codec yesterday, at the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Awards gala in Los Angeles. The codec can achieve compression ratios good enough to encode full resolution, 10-bit independent (intra) frame HD video at up to 100 Mbps. The codec allows users to capture master-quality video with exceptional color depth and higher encoding efficiency.
"Panasonic is pleased that our peers at the HPA have acknowledged the accomplishments of our AVC-Intra development team," said Michael Bergeron, Chief Technologist at Panasonic Broadcast. "For some time, our customers and technology partners have been asking for a 10-bit, full raster, intra-frame HD codec, capable of operating in field acquisition equipment as well as in desktop hardware and software."
Wal-Mart has begun a new promotional campaign dubbed Operation Main Street in which many products will see huge price cuts for a limited time.
From the full promotion however, Blu-ray products seem to be leading the pack. The Magnavox NB500MG9 Blu-ray player is selling for $198 USD, down from $229. The player is Profile 1.1 compatible and will upconvert standard definition DVDs to 1080p.
Potential buyers of the most popular Blu-ray player, the Sony PlayStation 3, should be delighted by the promotion as well. The $399 USD 80GB PS3 will come with a $100 USD Wal-Mart gift card that can be used on any items available at Walmart.com. PlayStation 2 buyers will receive a $30 USD gift card if purchasing the aging $129 USD
According to ABI Research, prices for older model Blu-ray players should drop to $150 USD for the holiday season, a steep price drop over their current average $200-250 USD price tags.
The analyst group says the price drops will be necessary to fight off pressures from emerging HD movie download services. The group also believes the studios will need strong Blu-ray sales for the holiday following the current economic downturn.
The sales prices will most likely be on older Profile 1.0 and 1.1 players that lack BD-Live Internet capabilities.
“Blu-ray vendors and dealers are starting to realize that for Blu-ray to become the next DVD, they need to lower player prices in order to generate interest and build volumes,”notes ABI Research's principal analyst Steve Wilson.
Warner Bros. is attempting to curb piracy of its products in China by offering a legal alternative to the country's 1.3 billion population. In co-operation with a Beijing-based media company called Voole, Warner Bros. will offer new titles from its vaults as digital rentals for a significantly reduced price compared to the street pirates. Bootlegged disks typically go for (GBP)£1 or less on the street.
Warner's plan is to offer the digital alternative rental service at a price of around 30p - 70p per download (based on the movie in question, one could only assume). The level of pirate products sold in China is in the area of 90%, but Warner and other concerned content companies cannot ignore the fact that China has one of the world's fastest growing economies.
Of course, the downloads will be protected by DRM, and the users will be able to download them and watch them from their computer or stream them over the Internet. Warner recently announced a similar plan to curb growing piracy in Korea.
Panasonic Corp. has announced that it intends to acquire its Japanese rival Sanyo Electric Co. in a move that would create Japan's largest electronics maker. The acquisition has an estimated price tag around $8.8 billion, a price Panasonic would pay to gain competitiveness in rechargeable battery production and solar power technology. Panasonic, the world's largest plasma TV maker, is sitting on $10 billion in cash.
The deal has many problems to be solved however. Panasonic needs to figure out what to do about Sanyo's loss-generating divisions which include microchips and home appliances. "Strategically (the deal) makes sense, though it doesn't necessarily make sense for Panasonic to take on every single bit of Sanyo Electric,"said Hannah Cunliffe, fund manager at Germany's Union Investment, which holds Panasonic shares. "There has to be some relatively aggressive restructuring."
Due to the demand for rechargeable batteries for mobile phones, notebooks, portable media players and even cars, Panasonic would like to capture Sanyo's leading position with the technology. Additionally, Sanyo is the world's seventh largest manufacturer of solar cells. "Adverse business conditions are making it difficult for us to achieve the kind of growth we have been striving for," Panasonic President Fumio Ohtsubo told a news conference. "We need a new growth engine within our group."
According to Gamasutra, Microsoft's Xbox 360currently has a higher attach rate (tie rate, attachment rate etc.) than the Nintendo Wii and SonyPlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. This metric measures, on average, the number of games sold per console. It's obviously flawed for several reasons, for example because it means a boost in hardware sales could mean a lower tie rate for a period of time (and a boost in hardware sales is hardly a bad thing?)
Nevertheless, it is used in the industry as a measure of a console's performance in the market overall. More interesting than the overall tie rate is the difference specifically in the sales of first and third-party games. Nintendo, for example, is expected to have a higher tie rate for 1st party games compared to the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Research firm Strategy Analytics reported on Friday that Samsung has become the largest mobile phone vendor in the United States based on third quarter results. Despite global economic woes, the mobile phone market in the United States actually grew 6.2% from the same quarter of 2007, adding up to 47.4 million handsets in the quarter. South Korean consumer electronics vendor Samsung nabbed the largest share of the market at 22.4%.
Following Samsung (but still behind Motorola) was its rival also from South Korea, LG Electronics, which commanded an impressive 20.5% share of the U.S. market during the third quarter. In the previous year, Motorola had the top spot in the market with a 32.7% share, which fell dramatically to 21.1% in the same period of this year.
Motorola has warned that its fourth quarter results will also miss expectations, and that its mobile phone business will continue to weaken during the first half of 2009. Nokia took 8.4% of the U.S. market during the quarter which was up from levels seen earlier this year. Regardless, Nokia sells more handsets than Samsung, Motorola and LG Electronics combined globally, with a staggering 38% global market share.
Pioneer has introduced its new LX01BDBlu-ray Disc home cinema system, complimenting the HD video of Blu-ray with "exclusive audio technologies". Sporting a distinctive and compact three-dimensional speaker design, it is ideal for Pioneer's line up of Full HDKuro televisions. The LX01BD incorporates a profile 1.1, BonusView Blu-ray Disc player that opens up a wide range of high definition entertainment options.
To provide lifelike motion picture, it provides HDMI Deep Colour support, which enables a wide range of colour tones and smooth transitions. The LX01BD has an integrated 5.1 channel amplifier and comes with compact dodecahedron technology derived satellite speakers that generate sound fields in all directions.
According to Nintendo's 2008 financial results briefing, the Wii gaming console was top seller in Europe, by far, for the year, shifting over 10.4 million units.
In second place was the Sony PlayStation 3 followed closely by the Microsoft Xbox 360.
The Wii had its best month in April when 180,000 units were sold. Its rivals each sold in the vicinity of 90,000 each for the same period.
The data did show what has been clear in North America and Japan though, that the recent price cuts on the Xbox 360 have helped it to surpass the PS3 for September and October. The sales still pale in comparison to Wii sales however, which remain strong.
For the handheld race, the DS took a big lead over its rival, the Sony PSP. At its peak, in July, the DS sold 225,000 units while the PSP sold only 50,000 for the same period.
According to co-founder Chris DeWolfe, MySpace is considering producing its own portable media player, one that will match its extremely popular MySpace Musicstreaming service.
Although he would not commit to whether a device is in development, he did say it was very "possible." For now however, the company wants to focus on its Music service which streams millions of songs, ad-subsidized of course, for free.
"If anything, we'll be accretive to iPod sales," DeWolfe said, speaking of the service's linking to pay-for track. "Unless we develop a device,"he added however.
Apple's focus however, has always been on sales of hardware and not so much on the sale of tracks or videos as the margins are very small. MySpace is interested in bringing more traffic to its pages for ad revenue.
Finnish Board of Film Classification has rated the DVD release of family drama series Little House on the Prairie banned for under 18 year-olds. The popular childrens television series got a red K-18 sticker which stands for: "The programme may be conveyed only to a person who has attained the age of 18."
The marketing manager of Universal Pictures Finland Meri Suomela told Reuters that to save money they did not sumbit the series to the inspection. The film board charges two euros per minute for inspecting. It would have cost Universal over 18 000 euros (over $23 000) for the 202 episode series. If a film or tv-series goes uninspected it is distributed as "Unclassified. Only for persons over 18 years."
Little House on the Prairie, which originally ran from 1974 to 1983, is shown by the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE on Sunday mornings.
According to unnamed entertainment executives talking to CNET, YouTube may be on the verge of streaming full-length major motion films on a new service.
The service would be very similar to the popular Hulu site and would let users watch ad-supported movies in a widescreen format. CNET is under the impression that YouTube is so far into negotiations that a formal launch could happen as soon as January.
The deal would mark a major turnaround for YouTube which has so far mostly refused to host video longer than a few minutes.
The service will most likely only be available via a PC web browser as most web video services insert ads using Flash which most video-enabled devices cannot load.
The research firm Canalys has reported that Nokia continues to lose smartphone market share to Apple and RIM.
Nokia's share has fallen from 51.4 percent for the Q3 2007 to 38.9 percent for the Q3 this year. Apple has grown from under 10 percent last year to 17.3 percent while RIM has grown to 15.2 percent for the quarter.
The firm says the strong growth for Apple can be attributed to the global launch of the iPhone 3G. The firm believes the Q4 can be very strong for RIM and push it past Apple if sales of the Bold, Storm, and Pearl 8220 devices all exceed conservative expectations.
Nokia has seen its Symbian software lose market share as well, from 68.1 percent to 46.6 percent from last year.
If the state of the economy isn't keeping you from making consumer electronics purchases you may want to find out if there's a Circuit City closing nearby. On Wednesday the company announced store closing sales at 154 locations.
“Merchandise will be marked down to sell fast. Everything must go,” said Stephen Miller, Principal and Managing Director, Gordon Brothers Group. “The timing couldn’t be better for consumers. We don’t expect this sale to last very long.”
Michael Keefe, President and CEO, Hilco Merchant Resources, said, “This sale comes at a perfect time for everyone to enjoy large savings on many of their holiday gift purchases. Consumers who arrive at the start of the sale will certainly have the best selection of products from which to choose and will find great values on everything in the store.” Both Gordon Brothers and Hilco were brought in to help oversee the store closings.
All sales at the 154 stores being closed are final on items purchased during the store closing event, but normal refund policies will apply to merchandise purchased prior to the sale commencement date. Circuit City gift cards purchased prior to the sale commencement date will be honored, but no gift cards will be sold at the 154 closing stores. Cash and all major credit cards will be accepted but not checks.
One of the big advantages to IPTV is the capability to use what are traditionally thought of as computer applications. AT&T has added a new service to their U-verse IPTV offering that does just that. It's called Weather On Demand and gives U-verse subscribers access to customized information from AccuWeather.com.
“Weather On Demand is another great example of the benefits of U-verse TV and our Internet Protocol (IP) platform,” said G.W. Shaw, AT&T executive director of U-verse marketing. “We’re making it easy for customers to check weather conditions and forecasts in their hometown or across the country, whenever they want. We know that AccuWeather.com’s content will be a great resource for our U-verse TV customers who want up-to-date and accurate weather information.”
Weather On Demand is accessed by tuning to a channel that has features similar to weather-related web pages. You can select a city and find out the current conditions, get a short or long term forecast, and even watch radar maps.
It's currently only being offered to subscribers in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Indianapolis and San Diego, but will eventually become a standard feature for all U-verse customers.
According to research by retail experts, video games will prove to be Britain's number one form of entertainment in 2008, beating music and other video products for the first time. Verdict Research predicts the video games market will grow by £1.37 billion ($2.19 billion), about 42% in 2008. The figure outstrips music and video sales which were expected to stagnate anyway.
The entire video games market in the UK is valued at about £4.64 billion ($7.42 billion), compared to music and video at £4.46 billion ($7.13 billion). "The music and video market is not just suffering from a slowing of growth but a massive transfer of spend to online," said the report's author Malcolm Pinkerton. "So in actual fact, the sales via high street shops are being hit a lot harder than the overall growth figures would suggest."
The report claimed that the music market gained revenue from sales of digital downloads but was hurt by growing piracy, price deflation and a decline in physical CD sales. "Games represent a relatively cheap, but also exciting and innovative pastime," said Matthew Piner, author of the Video Games and Consoles Retailing report. "As more people save money by staying in, a video game, although it may cost three of four times as much as a DVD or CD, offers much more longevity and hence better value for money."
Norway's Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon is keeping his pledge to put more pressure on Apple to cut the DRM tie between its iPod models and music downloads from the iTunes download store. The consumer mediator gave Apple a November 3rd deadline back in September this year, and now that the deadline has passed without Apple making enough effort (in the Ombudsman's opinion), it may face being brought before a government agency.
"iTunes has shown a lacking will to comply with our demand and we are now preparing to try this case in the Market Council,"Consumer Ombudsman Bjoern Erik Thon said in a statement. Back in 2006, Norway was among the world's first countries to take issue with Apple's FairPlay DRM, which while protecting music, also created a tie between hardware made by Apple and digital downloads it sells.
SanDisk Corp. has announced a new flash memory management system that it claims will significantly boost performance from Solid-State Drives (SSD). ExtremeFSS will boost the speed of writing common types of data by 100 times, said Don Barnetson, senior director of marketing at SanDisk. The system will allow data to be written to the drive without erasing and rewriting nearby data. The ExtremeFSS system will also boost the longevity of SSDs.
Currently available SSD drives are marketed as having significant advantages over mechanical spinning hard drives; they produce less heat, use less power and would seemingly be less prone to failure. However, in reality they were found to under-perform compared to standard mechanical HDDs when they were first widely used in notebooks.
They tend to be slower at writing small amounts of data to the memory, while performing quite well with large files. This isn't very convenient for excessive use. In addition to announcing ExtremeFSS, SanDisk also pushed for the industry to adopt a few helpful metrics. Long-term Data Endurance (LDE) for example would be a measure of the amount of data that could be written to an SSD before it fails.
Uruguayan Customs officials worked with Apdif Uruguay (local industry anti-piracy group) in an investigation which led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of pirated music and movie products. Officials discovered a smuggling ring that imports CDs from Uruguay to sell in the pirate markets of Brazil. The smugglers sourced blank discs from the free port of Montevideo and used the duty free shops as distribution points.
This allowed the pirates to evade import duties on both sides of the border and increase their profits by at least 50%. Apdif Uruguay and Uruguayan Customs officials raided the shops during October. The raids led to the seizure of a shipment of 750,000 blank DVD-Rs which had left Montevideo without proper documentation about its destination and content.
A further raid, carried out in conjunction with the Brazilian authorities, in the city of Santana do Livramento across the border, led to the seizure of 257,000 blank CD-Rs and DVD-Rs. The blank discs were destined for the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre in a touring bus belonging to the musical Brazilian group "Toque Fandangueiro". Documents seized along with the cargo indicated that these discs allegedly originated in Miami.
We have updated several guides that deal with the multimedia capabilities of Xbox 360, PS3 and Nintendo Wii consoles. The updates include guides for streaming content through a network to Xbox 360 or Wii, creating MP4 files for Xbox 360 or PS3, creating AVCHD for PS3 & Blu-ray players and using online TV sharing programs with Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii console.
One of the most recognizable names in music entertainment has maintained a "No Downloads" policy ever since Apple's iTunes revolutionized purchasing music on the Internet. AC/DC does not support the download format, and definitely not Apple's iTunes service. In Australia however, BigPond has added 16 AC/DC albums to its line-up, available in MP3 and WMA formats (some sell as WMA only).
"Since iTunes came into existence, we've actually increased our back catalogue sales without being on the site. We were sternly warned by our management team and our record label that the complete opposite would be the case,"Angus Young said in a recent interview.
"Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned, but this iTunes, God bless 'em, it's going to kill music if they're not careful,"Brian Johnson told Reuters. "It's a...monster, this thing. It just worries me. And I'm sure they're just doing it all in the interest of making as much...cash as possible. Let's put it this way, it's certainly not for the...love, let's get that out of the way, right away."
HMV, Woolworths, 7digital, Digitalstores, Tescodigital, Tunetribe, and Play.com have all agreed to promote a new "MP3 compatible" logo that they hope will raise the profile of the open MP3 music format and inform users on what they can do with their DRM-free downloads.
The logo should also help consumers identify legal music stores from P2P.
The Entertainment Retailers Association created the logo and says it will emphasize that MP3s can be played in all media players.
7digital's Ben Drury added that digital sales "have been booming because users love the freedom of MP3".
"The beauty of an MP3 file is that once you have bought it, you don't need to be a computer genius or a lawyer to make it work and you are not locked in to a relationship with a single retailer or hardware manufacturer," he said.
"This logo will not only help give consumers confidence that the music files they are buying will play on a wide range of devices, but will also help them know that they are legal and that artists are getting paid," noted Geoff Taylor, BPI chief executive.
Just one month after Comcast began imposing a bandwidth cap of 250 GB on all of its subscribers, AT&T has begun testing a cap of their own, however with a much smaller limit, 150 GB.
The cap will have tiers as well depending on how fast your connection is, slower users will only get 20 GB limit while the fastest users will get the 150 GB cap.
The test, beginning in Reno, Nevada today, will "evaluate a usage-based model that could potentially help address today's trend of explosive bandwidth usage, [and] may be extended to one other market by the end of the year," said AT&T.
Anyone in Reno who uses over 150 GB per month will automatically be enrolled in the full bandwidth trial at the end of the year.
Any trial participant that exceeds the limit will be given a one-month grace period but if they do it again they will be fined $1 for every GB over they go.
Unlike Comcast however, AT&T will provide all customers with a "bandwidth measuring tool" and will also notify customers when they have hit 80 percent of their limit.
Sony Music Entertainment Japan has announced the launch of a new disc standard today, Blu-spec, in which it hopes to use blue lasers to "cut CDs more accurately than would be possible with red lasers."
The company will also use polymer plastic for the actual discs and the combination will improve the quality of audio CDs while keeping compatibility with current CD players. Incompatibility has been the main weakness for Super Audio CDs and other audio standards.
The first Blu-spec discs will hit Japan on Christmas and will be mainly classical music discs as well as Jazz. Among the 60 titles available at launch will be Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 and Miles Davis' Kind of Blue.
The discs will all be Sony but they are hoping to "foster cross-label support" from the other Big 4 labels.
As part of "Operation Music Box", the Italian fiscal police have prosecuted forty-six people for uploading very large amounts of copyright infringing material through the Internet. The activity was carried out using eDonkey2000 and Direct Connect software. The investigation led to raids in 13 different provinces, turning up 1.7 million illegal mp3 files and more than 15,000 burnt CD-Rs containing copyright infringing music.
In total, 52 computers, two laptops, 81 external hard drives and 69 internal hard drives were seized. Under Italian law, the uploaders were held liable for more than €3 million in administrative sanctions. "People who upload hundreds or thousands of copyright infringing music tracks onto the Internet are breaking the law. They are stealing the livelihoods of artists, composers and record producers. I am delighted the Guardia di Finanza is holding them accountable for their actions," said Enzo Mazza, president of FPM.
The trade value of the recording industry in Italy has shrunk from &euro370.1 million in 2003 to €266.2 million in 2007, and this fall has been largely blamed on the widescale availability of illegal MP3 copies.
In mid-October, the Argentine coast guard targeted one of the most notorious piracy markets. The La Salada market has been targeted before, and has a reputation for housing enormous amounts of counterfeit products. The Economic Crime Unit executed several search warrants on warehouses around the market, located in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.
The raids were the result of an investigation that lasted for a year, targeting imported products entering the Port of Argentina found to have suspect invoices and to be undervalued. The products would (and do) end up in pirate markets all across the country as they move through the illicit chain.
The actions yielded five million discs containing music and films, 63 burners, two industrial printers and 200 master plates that are used for professional album cover replication. Several organized crime syndicates have been identified as operating in the market.
According to a new report published by Net Applications, Mozilla's Firefox web browser can now boast 20 percent of the global market share for browsers, slowly chipping away at Internet Explorer's once-thought of insurmountable lead.
The report says the browser has seen a huge surge in popularity thanks to the recent release of Firefox 3 as well as from converts fearing the infamously insecure Internet Explorer.
The milestone is even more impressive considering the growing popularity of Apple's Safari browser and the introduction of Google's Chrome browser.
Mozilla also added that they plan to replace their current JavaScript engine with TraceMonkey which will "improve operations within the application by 20 to 40 percent."
EZQuest has launched its latest Mac-based product, the internal PhoenixBlu-raySuper Drive 6X Rewriter.
The drive can play and record to CD, DVD, HD DVD and Blu-ray. The "device features a 4MB buffer for writing, and uses integrated buffer under-run protection. Files, folders, movies, or other content can be dragged and dropped directly from the Mac desktop to be written on the 50GB capacity discs," says the product page.
To be able to watch commercial Blu-ray or HD DVD discs on Macs however, the company says you will have to use Windows through Boot Camp on your computer.
The high-end home theater producer NAD has announced their first Blu-ray player, dubbed the T587, which includes Profile 2.0 support.
The T587 is expected to have the fastest load up time for Blu-ray movies (under a minute), a feature that should be welcome to many enthusiasts.
Electronista adds the player has "Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio surround sound, HDMI 1.3 output with support for Deep Color on the right HDTVs; it also supports Dolby Digital Plus for 10.2-channel sound over the newest audio systems. A front USB port handles MP3/WMA music and JPEG/PNG photos, while the disc drive itself can play back DivX clips."
The French Senate has voted in favor of a law that will have pirates kicked off the Internet for multiple offenses and the bill now goes to the French National Assembly for final approval.
Pirates caught illegally sharing protected content will get two warning emails before having their Internet connection cut off.
The idea of the "three strikes law" has been around since late 2007 when French President Nicolas Sarkozy introduced it and called the proposal "a decisive moment for the future of a civilised internet".
Under the law, ISPs will become Internet watchdogs keeping a closer look on the piracy tendencies of its users.
The Senate almost unanimously voted to back the law (297 to 15) and will also create a new government division to strictly oversee anti-piracy.
Netflix has announced plans to discontinue sales of used DVDs in an effort to shift focus back to its core businesses of streaming movies and TV and DVD rentals.
Posted in the official Netflix blog, the company said they will stop sales of used DVDs on November 30th.
The blog states:"As you know, our core business is delivering great movie rentals to you on DVD by mail and instantly to the computer and TV, so we've decided it makes sense for us to focus exclusively on that. This means we will stop selling previously viewed DVDs through the Web site. We're sorry for any inconvenience for those of you who regularly purchase DVDs at Netflix, but we're excited about being able to spend the extra time focusing on continually improving our core rental business for you."
The announcement comes on the heels of Netflix's announcement that their new Silverlight-based movie streaming player had gone to public beta and would be accessible to Mac users.
Many subscribers who posted on the blog however seemed to be against the move.
"Being able to purchase previously viewed movies from Netflix was a huge bonus of my membership. I am truly sorry to lose that benefit. I hate to lose features to my membership, and I hope this is not a trend,"wrote one subscriber.
Sonos, maker of networked music players, has introduced a free iPhone application for controlling their multiroom audio system. It allows the iPhone to emulate a proprietary remote, the Sonos CR100 Controller, which sells for $399.
The Sonos MultiRoom Music System can be used to play music from any networked computer in your house. It also interfaces directly with several music download and subscription services, as well as recently introduced support for free internet radio services.
Even though it seems you no longer need the remote, it appears that you'll still have to buy one with each ZonePlayer. Both the ZonePlayer90, which outputs a line level signal to feed other audio equipment, and the ZonePlayer120, outputting directly to speakers, are only sold with the controller. They cost $349 and $499 respectively.
Perhaps more interesting than the ability to control Sonos systems is the idea of programming smartphones to be advanced remotes. Arguably one of the biggest problems various mobile computing products, from PDAs to ultra mobile PCs, have had is their inability to perform tasks normally associated with desktops or laptops.
Western Digital has announced the release of the HD TV Media Player, a networked media hub that will allow users to attach up to two USB hard drives, media devices or other gadgets and browse the contents via your TV.
Electronista says "the Media Player merges the content of two USB drives into a single pool of media and uses both file names and metadata for menus and the search process, so those with incomplete music or video tags can still find content."
Video playback is supported for up to1080p through HDMI although what formats are playable was not disclosed. RCA outputs also allow for SD compatibility for older TVs.
The hub is available today and is priced at $130 USD without any HDDs.
Roku representatives have posted on the official Roku message boards that they will be partnering with Netflix again to deliver HD content to subscribers of the rental company before the end of the year.
Differentiating from the recent Microsoft-Netflix deal, Roku will "use different Advanced Profile encoding to deliver the HD content at significantly lower bit-rates."
Roku will be delivering Netflix in HD by the end of the year
- Roku will be using Advanced Profile encodes which will deliver HD at substantially lower bit-rates than what Xbox is offering
- The number of titles is up to Netflix but the library will be the same as or larger than the Xbox library
- The UI will be updated to run in 720p and more covers will be visible on the screen at a time
- And the release will include another major new feature that you’ll have to wait a bit longer to learn about.
Netflix has announced the public beta of its streaming movie player for Mac computers, marking the first time Mac users can use the company's extensive "Watch Instantly" library.
Users can now opt-in to try out the player as long they have Microsoft's Silverlight animation plug-in.
Mac users will have access to over 12,000 titles and the company says they will continue to add more content on a daily basis. The program will become available outside of the beta stage by Christmas.
There is some DRM in the beta however which will limit the number of authorized devices to six, and each device must have Silverlight installed.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has announced that once again a court has ruled against a DVD player manufacturer for violations of the Content Scrambling System (CSS) agreement. The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the plaintiffs are allowed to review and test any new or re-engineered product incorporating the copy protection technology before it can make it to market.
The court issues a permanent injunction banning Gowell Electronics Ltd. from violating the CSS license agreement. It is the result of lawsuit brought against the company in June by the MPAA alleging breach of contract and it is the ninth case in which a court has sided with the MPAA members in preventing future violations of the CSS license.
The MPAA estimates that it loses $11 billion per year from the sale of pirated goods and illegal copying. CSS is a (weak) prevention against copying that was beaten a decade ago and is present on pretty much all retail DVDs on the market.
MySpace.com and Viacom's MTV have hooked up with Auditude as part of its quest to create revenue streams from online video piracy. Nowadays, Internet video piracy doesn't just exist on BitTorrent sites or P2P networks. User-driven sites like YouTube and MySpace are packed full of videos published without authorization, providing easy access to the content and little or no control to owner of the content.
That's where Auditude comes in. Auditude, theoretically, through partnerships with online social networking sites and content providers, gives another option besides removal; gaining advertising revenue. On the surface this sounds like a logical and professional move for content distributors to take. It can provide revenue with little or no extra work put in by the content companies. The work to get the content online is taken care of by the user and the bandwidth costs are covered by the service involved.
However, what it does take away from the content companies is a level of control. One thing that most content providers always want control of, is the distribution of its copyrighted works. Apple's iTunes service sold billions of legal downloads after launching in an era of rampant music piracy, yet the control it demands over aspects of distribution has caused serious tension between the company and record labels.
DVD producer Giant Interactive has announced it has moved into Blu-ray production, noting its first two releases will be A&E Video’s Universe: The Complete Season 1 and Paul McCartney: The Space Within Us, both set for release on November 18th.
The studio noted the recent hiring of executive producer Jeffrey Eagle and director of digital operations Jay Chumley who will now be in charge of Blu-ray.
Eagle is best known for his work as creative director for Herzog-Cowen Entertainment where he worked on Pirates of the Caribbean, and other media.
Chumley used to work for LaserPacific and 1K Studios, and worked on hit DVDs such as Lord of the Rings and Sex and the City box sets.
The studio will work with Walt Disney Studios, Lionsgate, ABC Family, Starz Entertainment, HBO and CBS.
Mformation Technologies has announced they are suing BlackBerry maker Research In Motion over patent infringement. Mformation is a handset management software firm.
The firm says RIM has infringed two patents with its BlackBerry smartphone and its management software. There was no other details on what was being infringed or what Mformation was hoping to get out of the suit.
"After refusing to license Mformation's disclosed systems and software, RIM modified its BlackBerry software to include Mformation's patented systems and methods of remote management," Mformation said.
"Mformation provides mobile device management solutions to mobile operators and enterprises around the globe. We firmly believe in the importance and value of innovation, and have invested significantly for many years in developing our industry leading device management technology. We are also committed to protecting our intellectual property as it is a core asset of our business when absolutely necessary," said Mark Edwards, Mformation's Chief Executive Officer.
However, like most media content, the NXE has been leaked online and has seen thousands of downloads already. If you download it though hoping to be the first person on your block to do so, you are in for an unwanted surprise though. Any user trying to log into Xbox Live while running the leaked NXE will be blocked from XBL until November 19th.
Although unconfirmed, you also run the risk of being blocked from XBL permanently, in the same boat as users using flashed firmwares and copied games.
If you are really that excited for NXE, I think it pays to wait the almost three weeks for it.
The infamoustorrenttrackerThe Pirate Bay has hit a new milestone, reaching 20 million unique peers. It has been estimated that the site tracks over 50 percent of all BitTorrent users that are on at any point.
In 2006 the site tracked 3 million peers which moved up to 6 million peers by November 2007. In April of this year, TPB admin and founder Brokep noted that they had hit 12 million peers. The growth has been exponential and does not seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Admin Peter Sunde added that there was previously limits on how many peers the site could track but those have been lifted thanks to new changes. “I wish we had lots and lots of money so we could just buy like 10 servers and another gigabit,” he jokingly added.
According to new weekly data from Media Create, the PlayStation 3 had its worst sales week of 2008 in Japan, being outsold almost 2-to-1 by its rival, the Xbox 360.
The launch of the new updated PSP-3000 model helped boost sales of the handheld and it topped the sales chart by a hefty number.
The Xbox 360 continues to sell well, as does the ever-popular Wii yet the PS3 keeps seeing its sales fall.
According to a new patent filing, Sony is developing a wireless motion sensitive controller for the PlayStation 3 that will use a new type of "ultrasonic tracking system."
The controller itself will break apart and combine to perform different actions.
"Game interface tracks the position of one or more game controllers in 3-dimensional space using hybrid video capture and ultrasonic tracking system," reads the summary at the US Patent & Trademark office.
"The captured video information is used to identify a horizontal and vertical position for each controller within a capture area. The ultrasonic tracking system analyses sound communications to determine the distances between the game system and each controller and to determine the distances among the controllers," reads the document.
According to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the new DSi handheld will launch in North America and Europe in August 2009 after launching in Japan this month.
In an effort to combat slowing sales in Japan, the DSi went on sale today for JPY 18,900 (about 192 USD). Iwata did not give any other details for the NA or EU release but did give the expected date.
"Specific plans will be unveiled by our local subsidiaries, but an autumn or year-end launch would probably be too late,"said Iwata.
When asked whether the current economic downturn was affecting DS handheld sales, Iwata said it was not.
"With the business environment having changed this much, we of course need to stay alert. But so far I haven't seen even the slightest sign that overseas DS and Wii demand is being affected by the economy," Iwata added.
Apple has come under criticism this week for their apparent blocking of the popular mobile browser Opera Mini from the iPhone App Store.
Opera chief Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner has said they have the alternative to Apple's Safari browser already developed but Apple's App Store guidelines will not let it through as it will compete directly with Safari.
When the iPhone SDK was released in March, it became clear that Apple would "specifically bars third-party interpreters that call on non-Apple frameworks and languages, which by definition would include Opera's web rendering engine. This would have left Opera Software converting software unlikely to be released in the near term."
According to a flooding of posts over at xbox-scene, it appears that the cooler-running Jasper-based Xbox 360 consoles have begun arriving in stores featuring the highly anticipated 65nm GPU which should significantly reduce RROD failures.
Random House, the large book publisher, has announced that they will be digitizing an additional 8000 books, in an effort to take advantage of explosive e-book growth.
